Frank Bowling: What do you believe happens when we die?

The question

What do you believe happens when we die?

Originally asked

The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A

A recurring late-stage question in The Guardian Q&A, with materially different answers on publisher-hosted pages.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here

I hope I’ll find my mother and father in heaven. Only my father would probably say, “You can’t come and live here, boy!”

The Q&A, The Guardian, 20 June 2026 source ↗

Others on this question

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Layton Williams

I really hope there is a big pearly gate.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 December 2024 source ↗

Billy Crudup

Hopefully we have life in the minds and hearts of the people we interacted with.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 7 February 2026 source ↗

Tony Judt Historian and essayist

I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself. But there's a big but which enters in here. I am much more conscious than I ever was, for obvious reasons, of what it will mean to people left behind once I'm dead. It won't mean anything for me. But it will mean a lot to them. ... So in one curious way I've come to believe in the afterlife as a place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this life except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I get there, it'll be too late.

Recorded Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, 29 March 2010 source ↗

Midge Ure